Friday, March 18, 2005 | 11:18 a.m.
The Energy Department may have known as early as 2000 about problems with Yucca Mountain "quality assurance" documents, lawyers working for Nevada said.
After combing through documents posted on a Yucca document database, the lawyers discovered an Energy Department audit from 2000 that reviewed Yucca documents from 1997 to 1998. The audits uncovered problems with U.S. Geological Survey documentation, said Joe Egan, a lawyer leading legal efforts against Yucca Mountain.
"The audit reveals a whole litany of errors," Egan said.
For example, the audit found that USGS officials claimed that they had calibrated instruments that did not exist at Yucca, Egan said.
The discovery seemed to conflict with the Energy Department, which on Wednesday announced that department officials first discovered alleged document falsification on March 11.
The department said it had discovered e-mails sent between 1998 and 2000 by two USGS employees that indicate the USGS had falsified Yucca Mountain documents. Those documents were designed to verify previously completed scientific work at the planned underground nuclear waste repository.
The e-mails were discovered as part of a massive Energy Department review of millions of pages of Yucca documents as it prepares to submit a license application to build the nuclear waste repository, Energy Department officials said.
The revelation touched off a firestorm of reaction from Nevada officials and other longtime Yucca critics who said the news indicates significant -- even potentially fatal -- flaws in the Yucca program.
But sources with the Interior Department, the parent agency of USGS, cautioned that investigations may prove that no actual scientific work was falsified -- merely the subsequent documentation of the work.
The Energy Department and Interior Department directed their inspectors general to investigate.
Egan's legal team is looking to verify the audit document it discovered and continues to search for further new evidence of impropriety, he said. It's not clear if that audit had uncovered the same USGS e-mails in question this week, he said.
"There's no end to where this could go," Egan said.
The Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile in letters sent Thursday to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller, Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., asked the Justice Department to investigate -- and to take action to secure Yucca records to prevent tampering.
In their letter, Reid and Ensign asked Gonzales and the FBI to "preserve and protect" any memoranda, reports, analyses, models, documents, correspondence, and other information associated with the Yucca license application.
"In addition, we request that you seek to protect and preserve any and all archival electronic messages and all records previously and currently being reviewed" for the comprehensive Yucca database known as the Licensing Support Network.
The e-mails "called into question the quality, validity and integrity of the scientific review and quality assurance processes associated with the YMP," the letter said.
Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval, a Republican, sent his own letter to Gonzales, asking the Energy Department make the e-mails public.
Sandoval said that the falsified data discovery was "deeply disturbing" and he too urged Gonzales to order the Energy Department to secure the entire Yucca Mountain database and initiate an independent probe.
"If the Yucca Mountain database has been compromised, independent investigators should be allowed to determine the extent and the severity of the activity," Sandoval wrote.
Egan said that if Gonzales agrees to seize records, it would be similar to action taken by the federal government during an FBI raid at Rocky Flats, Colo., in the 1980s. A federal grand jury later investigated claims of falsified record-keeping at the Energy Department facility that processed plutonium for nuclear weapons.
There is no indication that there has been document tampering, Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said. The request to preserve documents is precautionary, she said.
Hafen said Reid's office also is trying to determine if a whistleblower tipped off the Energy Department as to where to look for falsified records.
"We also are in the process of having representatives from the Departments of the Interior and Energy come to our offices in the next couple of weeks" to explain in detail what happened, Hafen said.
Nevada officials have long said that the issue of how fast water flows through Yucca Mountain is at the heart of their argument that Yucca could not safely isolate waste. Water would corrode metal waste containers and potentially carry radioactive material into the environment, Yucca critics say.
Energy Department officials say their studies have shown that water does not move quickly into the repository, which is why Yucca critics are so interested to know exactly what water infiltration documents were allegedly falsified.
One critical part of the water-flow research was the discovery of chlorine-36, a radioactive component of atmospheric atomic bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean in the 1950s. When Energy Department scientists discovered traces of it 1,000 feet inside Yucca Mountain in 1996, the state said it was evidence that water flowed faster than expected, said Bob Loux, Nevada's chief watchdog on the federal project.
Although groups critical of Yucca Mountain petitioned the Energy Department at that time to disqualify the site, saying the government's own guidelines had been violated, the repository project continued.
"I think the chlorine-36 data is relevant and hope the Energy Department will look at it," Loux said.
Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of the environmental watchdog group Citizens Alert, said that the state deserves a full and independent review of all Yucca documents.
"I think it puts every single scientific test under scrutiny," Johnson said. "Am I surprised? No. In order to take bad science to 'sound' science, there has to be some lies involved."
The e-mails in question this week were written between May 1998 and March 2000 and dealt with documentation of scientific computer modeling of water flow.
While using a sampling process to review several million e-mails, Energy Department contractors discovered about 20 suspicious messages from a hydrologist working with a team of 10 or more other scientists on Yucca water studies, USGS spokeswoman A.B. Wade told the Associated Press.
The e-mails were from a hydrologist to his supervisor, and co-workers were copied, the AP reported. The e-mails suggested the scientist was falsifying documents related to the study.
It wasn't clear whether the supervisor or other co-workers were actively engaged in the exchange, and the author of the e-mails is the focus of suspicion, Wade said. She said about 10 employees were privy to the e-mails and all but one still work for USGS.
archive
